enemies. One of the best and most delightful friends he has ever
had,--M. de la Villemarque,--has seen clearly enough that often the
alleged antiquity of his documents cannot be proved, that it can be
even disproved, and that he must rely on other supports than this to
establish what he wants; yet one finds him saying: 'I open the
collection of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century.
Taliesin, one of the oldest of them,' . . . and so on. But his
adversaries deny that we have really any such thing as a 'collection
of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century,' or that a
'Taliesin, one of the oldest of them,' exists to be quoted in defence
of any thesis. Sharon Turner, again, whose Vindication of the
Ancient British Poems was prompted, it seems to me, by a critical
instinct at bottom sound, is weak and uncritical in details like
this: 'The strange poem of Taliesin, called the Spoils of Annwn,
implies the existence (in the sixth century, he means) of
mythological tales about Arthur; and the frequent allusion of the old
Welsh bards to the persons and incidents which we find in the
Mabinogion, are further proofs that there must have been such stories
in circulation amongst the Welsh.' But the critic has to show,
against his adversaries, that the Spoils of Annwn is a real poem of
the sixth century, with a real sixth-century poet called Taliesin for
its author, before he can use it to prove what Sharon Turner there
wishes to prove; and, in like manner, the high antiquity of persons
and incidents that are found in the manuscripts of the Mabinogion,--
manuscripts written, like the famous Red Book of Hergest, in the
library of Jesus College at Oxford, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries,--is not proved by allusions of the old Welsh bards, until
(which is just the question at issue) the pieces containing these
allusions are proved themselves to possess a very high antiquity. In
the present state of the question as to the early Welsh literature,